


To Tumble Blindly (As We Make Our Way Across the Universe)

by JaneTurenne



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-02
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-22 04:50:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/909122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneTurenne/pseuds/JaneTurenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day after he turns four, the sky outside turns upside down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Tumble Blindly (As We Make Our Way Across the Universe)

**Author's Note:**

> Beta thanks to [fatalcookies](http://archiveofourown.org/users/FatalCookies/pseuds/FatalCookies)!

The day after he turns four, the sky outside turns upside down.

 _Inside_ isn’t a problem. Inside the world stays right-way-up, and anyway, inside has _ceilings_. It is only when his mother nudges him out the front door, wearily herding her elder child with a handful of keys and with his baby brother on her hip, that the great blue dome of the sky comes swooping down to meet him, frothing rabid with hungry, carnivorous clouds, and the comforting presence of gravity, forever before his protector and friend, offers him up in sacrifice to that endless empty celestial rapacity with not so much protest as even a shrug, and the immediate freefall certainty of death comes whistling, with all its vertigo, into his ears.

The tracks that his clinging fingernails leave in the doorframe stay with the house for a generation, decades after the terrified boy is long gone.

*

The boy’s mother tries to take him outside many times in the days following his birthday. He tries to be good for her, to stop screaming and screaming with every step, to stop fighting her grip to run back into the house. But how can he help it, how, when he spends every moment falling and falling into the endless drowning depths of the sky?

His mother always gives up in the end, and let him run back up into his room, where he can hide under the blankets. She is even kind, and lets him take the little red portable record player into his room to help him feel calm again. He likes her records, even though he does not know the names of the men who sing the songs. They sing about Starmen and rain falling in paper cups, and his universe begins to make sense again. Sometimes he even sings along in his little toy microphone, and hears his mother join him from down the hall where she is folding the laundry, and that is the kindest thing of all.

His father is not kind.

Two weeks after the sky falls, the boy lies awake while his father yells at night. His father yells at his mother about the swing-set--the one bought for the boy’s birthday, the one he has not used. His father yells about the money the swing-set cost, the work and sweat to earn the money and the work and sweat of turning wrenches and spinning screwdrivers to assemble the swing-set from a bundle of poles and washers in a box into a gleaming paradise of neatly-ordered monkey bars, into the swings that the boy watches with sad yearning, from the window, as they creak and sway in the breeze. His father is angry, and uses words that the boy does not understand, but knows are not good words to say. His father is loud, and growing louder. The boy wishes that he was not awake, even though when he does sleep, he dreams about the sky.

There is a thump-thump-thumping on the stairs, and the door swings open, and drenches the room in the honey-yellow light of the lamps in the hall. His baby brother starts to cry in the crib as his father pulls the boy out of bed by the collar of his pajamas, which are yellow polyester, and slippery. His father starts to swear again as the boy slides slowly and inexorably down out of his grasp--because this is inside, and inside means falling towards the ground.

He hears his mother trying to protest, but his father pushes her aside as he hefts the boy over his shoulder. The boy watches his mother from his new perch, looking imploringly into her eyes. He sees her hesitate, and then she goes in to comfort the baby instead. The boy feels abandoned, and afraid.

His father carries him down the stairs and out toward the back door. The boy knows what is coming now, and he pleads and struggles, but his father says nothing, hears nothing. His father only walks down the stairs, and across the kitchen, and opens the back door. His unkind father carries him outside in his yellow polyester pajamas, and it is _night_. And if the sky is frightening in the daytime, that is nothing to the terrors that it holds for him now.

The galaxies stretch wide their arms, reaching, reaching. The constellations grin evil grins, with a billion stars apiece for teeth. The moon spreads wide its maw. And the great wide open void rumbles its malevolent satisfaction with the primal, ancient instinct to _feed_.

The boy struggles and kicks and sobs. And when that does nothing, he turns his head, and sinks his teeth into his father’s unlistening ear, and he _tears_.

*

They lock him in a white room. He is a big boy now, so he knows what a hospital is. He does not mind being in the hospital room; it is a room, after all, with a ceiling. He only wishes he had not had to wait so long before someone (a sad-faced nurse with a faded blue flannel) came to wash his father’s dry and crusty blood off of his mouth.

They are not unkind to him here, though they leave him alone a lot in the white room. When he is not alone, a doctor with shiny glasses comes to ask him questions. He wonders if, behind the glasses, she has any eyes at all.

The doctor asks him over and over what is so scary about outside. He tries very hard to please her. He tells her all about the upside-down sky, using his best words. But he knows that she does not listen, or believe him. He knows, because sometimes she tries to take him out onto the balcony, as he pleads and screams and cries. It does not help that she walks out first, or that she holds his hand. One doctor, or all the doctors in the world, could never hold him down against the relentless tugging strength of the entire _sky._

One day, after she has tried and failed again to make him walk through the door of the balcony, the doctor tells him that she has been speaking to his mother. She opens a cabinet on the other side of the room from the chair he is clutching with all his strength. Inside is a turntable, with a bright black record on it.

The doctor turns on the record, and the music is peaceful and soothing and pretty, even though there are no words to sing to. After a time, the boy creeps carefully across the room to peek at the spinning record, and there is comfort in knowing that something so beautiful can spin and spin--as he does, when he swirls into the bottomless sky--and yet stay exactly where it is.

The music stops, and the record clicks to a halt. The boy is smart, he knows that, and he knows that the reason he is smart (his grandmother told him) is that he can read. He does not know many words--not the long one on the top of the record, the one that starts with a D--but he can read the name of the song. It says ‘Clouds.’

The boy stares at the record, and walks over to the corner of the room. He sits in the corner, and pulls his knees up to his forehead, and he cries.

That is the day the boy stops talking, because he knows that nobody will ever listen, and even if they try, they will not hear.

*

The sky begins creeping in through the window. The boy tries to push his bed to the other side of the room, but he is not strong enough, and anyway, the bed is bolted down. He carries his blankets and pillow over to the other side of the room, and sleeps on the floor.

That is not enough to stop the dreams. _Nothing will ever be enough_ , the sky says in his sleep. _I will send a mighty wind, and tear this false sky made of plaster and wood from above your head. I am only waiting until you grow a little. I am fattening you up. And I never, never forget_.

He is afraid so much of the time, now, that the terror only makes him tired. And even in his four-year-old soul, he knows that is what it means to be ready to die.

*

The doctor with the shiny glasses tries two or three times to make him speak. After that, she stops coming. The boy does not miss her.

The only person who does come, after that, is the sad-faced nurse. She brings him his food, and sometimes gives him baths. She does not try to speak to him, but sometimes she hums. He likes that about her.

One day, it is raining outside the window. He is the nurse’s first patient of the day, and when she walks into his room she is wet. Her umbrella, which she leans in the corner of his room, is wet, and so is the green rubber rain jacket she hangs on the back of the door. Then somebody calls to her from down the hall, and she walks away through the open door, and he is alone again.

The boy looks at the umbrella. He looks at the green rubber jacket. And he looks outside the window, at the salivating sky.

*

Forty-five minutes later, the emergency broadcast system issues an amber alert for a four-year-old boychild with mouse-colored hair. He has escaped from the mental ward of St. Gabriel’s hospital, the announcer warns, and may well be a danger to others and himself.

*

Have you ever seen a tiny child, nose-tip peeking out of the tortoise-shell of a raincoat many sizes too big, falling up through the raindrops, while situated cozily inside a very seaworthy black umbrella to which he clings with the last desperate strength of a hunted animal? Have you ever watched the clouds part with cruel triumph, poised and ready--like a gourmand with a forkful of the choicest force-fed foie gras--for the long-awaited feast?

No?

Well, then. I don’t suppose it’s worth even trying to describe it to you, is it? I’ll just tell you what the boy felt: the painful yet utterly unquashable desire for survival, coupled with the almost-soothing certainty of his own very nearly imminent demise.

You _do_ know what _that’s_ like. I mean, we’ve all been _there_ , right?

*

The clouds rub their damp hands all over him. He is the sacrifice to be adored, nearly worshipped. If he were not four, the boy might think the word ‘lascivious,’ but he does not know any words like that.

And then it stops. Everything stops. _Everything_ stops. And he sleeps, and does not dream.

And then he wakes up, in the wreckage of a black umbrella, beneath-- _beneath_ \--the punishing gaze of the noontime sun.

*

Something nudges him. He thinks it is a foot.

“This is my front garden, y’know,” says a voice. It is not an angry voice. It is not a voice that finds the situation very unusual at all.

The boy sits up, slowly. To him, the woman standing underneath the sun-- _underneath_ the sky, which stays _still_ \--is old, though an adult would call her only middle-aged.

The boy says nothing. He does not speak, anymore. The woman looks at him. Then she quirks her head, as though listening to something that no one can hear.

“Ohhhh,” she says. “A little feud with the sky, was it? Yes. The angels know. He’s a right bastard, that’s what they say, especially when he’s got gravity fighting on his side. You did well, to find your way here.”

He blinks at the woman, and still says nothing. She pulls him gently to his feet, and takes his hand. “Come on, then,” she says. “Let’s find you somewhere with a good roof. The mayor’s got a good hold on the weather, I’ll give ‘er that, but even she won’t be able to hide you forever. Not from the _sky_.”

The boy holds the strange woman’s hand, and follows willingly. He is in the desert, and there is sand stuck to his cheek where he fell, and drifting across the pavement. He brushes off his face, but he likes the gritty feeling of the sand under his feet, in their thin hospital shoes. It is like little bits of ground gently reminding him that something solid and large and _real_ is under his feet. His green raincoat drags through the sand like a train, and leaves a path behind him, so he can never get lost.

The woman’s name is Josie. The boy learns this from a small black dragon that tips its hat to her on the sidewalk. The dragon then gravely takes the boy’s hand in his claw, and shakes it with a kind “How do you do?” The boy decides that any dragon so polite must have had a good mother who raised it with care. He thinks he will like this place, whatever it is. He likes it even though the streets seem to twist, and sometimes shimmer and move like the ocean; even though only two of the many people he sees through the window of the bright green diner have what the boy thinks of as the right number of heads; and even though one of Josie’s arms is, in fact, a tree limb, complete with leaves and flowers and a family of wrens living in her elbow.

Josie takes the unspeaking boy to a big concrete building. It looks _solid_. The boy looks up at her and squeezes her hand--the one with the smooth caramel-colored skin, not birchbark--in thanks. “You’re welcome, sweeting,” she replies, as though he had spoken, and walks inside with him.

The boy does not know what this place is, at first. All the walls are thick. Some people sit in cubicles, typing on typewriters that, instead of clacking, produce musical notes with every keyfall, or else that print onto the paper, instead of letters, assorted postage stamps with the heads of long-dead queens and kings. One of the people typing is made of stained-glass. Another wears his muscles and organs on the outside, but he types away as enthusiastically as any of the rest.

Then they are out of the big room with the typewriters, and into a long corridor lined with doors. Some of the doors have windows in them, and he sees women, men and assorted creatures who seem to be talking into microphones that hang from the ceiling. On the other side of the hall, the doors are blank, and somehow frightening.

“You stay here for just a minute,” Josie instructs, and pulls a jar of something bright blue from the pocket of her overalls. He watches, fascinated, as she peels a swath of birchbark off of her tree-arm, then opens the jar and dips her fingers inside. “No paper and pencils here,” she explains cheerfully, as she finger-paints a message on the strip of what he can only think of as her skin.

THIS BOY FOUGHT THE SKY AND HE STANDS

BY THE COVENANT OF THE LAST,

WE OWE HIM OUR SANCTUARY

Josie slips the strip of bark under the nearest door. “Stand back,” she instructs, as she does the same.

There is a very loud noise from inside the door, and a puff of thick purple smoke bursts from the crack around the doorframe. “That means yes,” Josie informs him, and brushes a few splinters of wood from his raincoat. “Come on, then. Let’s go find you a room.”

*

The recording studio--that, the boy learns, is where he lives now--has many rooms, for living in as well as for business. Most of the staff live there, because it is one of the safest places in Night Vale, and in Night Vale safety is not easy to find. He is told this by Jonah, who becomes his particular friend, even though the boy still does not speak.

Jonah is an Intern, which, he tells the boy in a cheerful voice, means that he will “Probably not last long, so get your fill while you can, yeah?” He has a rich, beautiful accent, and rich, beautiful skin, dark as the kind of chocolate with too little sugar in it to eat. He is _almost_ all human, except his teeth, which are even more beautiful than the rest of him. When he smiles, Jonah’s teeth become an impressionist masterpiece of swirling color, and it is impossible not to smile back. The boy has not smiled since his fourth birthday. It feels strange, like breathing again after being underwater, but good.

The boy becomes a fixture of the recording studio. In another place, he might be called the ghost of those halls, but in Night Vale that would bring down a multi-million dollar lawsuit from the Union of Spectres, Hobgoblins and Spooks, and _no one_ wants to mess with the USHS. Still, the boy is always there, always watching and roaming the halls. Josie comes to visit him, sometimes. She has told everyone in the station what happened to him, and so nobody tries to make him go outside. And he loves them, each and every one, for _believing_ , and swears never to disbelieve anyone else’s stories again, however fantastic they might seem.

Overall, he likes his life very much. The food is good, the beds are comfortable and the ceiling is strong. The only bad part is Mr. Carsberg’s son, Stevey, who is five, and the bigger of the two boys. Stevey pulls his hair and pinches him to try to make him talk--until the day Josie catches him at it. She tells Stevey (though the boy does not know how she knows) about his father’s ear, and that it would serve Stevey right if the boy bit his off, too. After that Stevey only makes faces at him from across the room when he visits, and the boy is happy.

And when he goes to sleep at night, he dreams of the peaceful, sheltering desert, and the quiet, satisfied stillness of the moon.

*

When the boy has been in the recording studio seven months, he is wandering down a corridor when a many-eyed pseudopod--Jim--comes hurtling out of a studio door. “Three minutes to piss,” Jim burbles at the boy, “no time to talk,” and rushes off in the direction of the bathroom door marked ‘Other,’ the one with the pictogram of something with too many limbs.

The boy has never been allowed into an active sound booth before--he knows it is active by the red ON AIR sign above the door--though he has played there many times when not in use. He cannot quite resist the urge to sneak through the door. There is a record spinning on the turntable, but inside the booth he cannot hear it. He climbs up into the chair, which is far too big for him. The headphones are slightly slimy, after Jim, but he holds them over his ears nonetheless.

He knows this song. It reminds him of his mother, and what it meant to be loved.

He closes his eyes.

With the headphones clasped over his ears, it feels only like he is mouthing his lips around _Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes_ and all the rest. It isn’t until the song is over, when he opens his eyes and peeks over the recording console, that he realizes he has been singing. And even then, he only knows it by the crowd of recording studio personnel who have gathered on the other side of the glass to stare at the strangest sight in Night Vale: their little ghost, who has reclaimed the voice that was eaten by the sky.

The boy stares, in shock and more than a little fear, over the emptiness of dead air. And then Jonah, who stands in the first row of watchers, gives his most brilliant-ever smile, and a big thumbs up. And the boy smiles too, and clears his throat.

“My name is Cecil Baldwin,” he says, in a voice which, while still a boy’s voice, sounds much older and much more _his own_ than he ever remembered, “and this has been the weather.”

*

Thirty years later, in another dimension, the new tenants of an old white house replace the old scratched doorframe, and the last physical traces of one small boy’s life disappear forever.

And off in the desert, a scientist named Carlos contemplates his Biggest Fan’s chosen accoutrement, and then shrugs. He has lived in Night Vale long enough that he finds almost nothing strange anymore. So what’s wrong with dating a man who won’t walk out the door without the protection of what he insists is a thoroughly necessary and useful open umbrella?


End file.
